Agreed. "Micro" is a terribly defined term, and it sounds like this team went absolutely nuts in one direction. (And then in response to their problems, went as far back as possible to a single monolith.) This suggests a bit of a lack of nuance in their decision making process to me.
I'm not interested in figuring out exactly what the right marketing term for it is, but I've had good experiences with teams of 6-10 engineers owning something like 2-5 services with a larger ecosystem of dozens to hundreds of services. Of course, I've been working at very large companies with extremely high traffic for several years now, so my experience is skewed in that direction.
If I had three engineers on my team I'd be unlikely to end up with more than a small handful of services. Half the benefit of splitting up your services has to do with keeping your independent teams actually independent -- if it's just one team then that isn't a problem in the first place.
> If I had three engineers on my team I'd be unlikely to end up with more than a small handful of services.
We have a small team and have a handful of services. We also have a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. It's worked really well. I doubt any would be considered 'micro', but instead they are designed around functional areas like authentication or backend processing.
> I doubt any would be considered 'micro', but instead they are designed around functional areas like authentication or backend processing.
Yeah, who knows what micro means, but that's exactly how I like to split up services. If at some point a service gets too large, split it up. Hundreds of services out the gate is a gross premature optimization. (And like most premature optimizations, ends up costing much more time both in development and in maintenance.)
I'm not interested in figuring out exactly what the right marketing term for it is, but I've had good experiences with teams of 6-10 engineers owning something like 2-5 services with a larger ecosystem of dozens to hundreds of services. Of course, I've been working at very large companies with extremely high traffic for several years now, so my experience is skewed in that direction.
If I had three engineers on my team I'd be unlikely to end up with more than a small handful of services. Half the benefit of splitting up your services has to do with keeping your independent teams actually independent -- if it's just one team then that isn't a problem in the first place.